The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
RFID tags and barcode labels are used in a variety of applications, such as tracking physical objects, inventory management, warehouse operations. For example, a RFID tag having a memory chip is programmed to encode information on an object, and is allocated to the object. A barcode label having information on the object is printed on the surface of the object.
Typically, a RFID printer is used to print a RFID label on the surface of the object and encode information to a tag embedded into the label with the same ID number. However, in many applications, tags are not printable. Such applications include, for example, but not limited to, those using tags embedded into the object or those using tags with rugged packages. In these applications, an object is positioned so that a barcode label printed on the object is scanned by the barcode scanner, and then the object is relocated so that a tag allocated to the object is read by the RFID reader subsequently. The barcode label information and the tag information will be associated after these operations. The barcode label and the RFID tag association takes time since it requires manually moving the object to read and associate the barcode label and the RFID tag, and there is a high risk of error in the association process.